The Female Supercomputer Designer Who Inspired Steve Jobs
The designer and artist Tamiko Thiel gets her due in a new show at MoMA.
It started with a T-shirt.
The product designer and mechanical engineer Tamiko Thiel was working for the Cambridge, Massachusetts, company Thinking Machines. She and her colleagues were building a supercomputer that proposed a radical new concept. Instead of using one giant processor to crunch large amounts of data, they were going to use thousands of processors that would tackle little parts of the data-crunching one by one. It was the early 1980s, and Thinking Machines was trying to build an artificially intelligent machine based on the human brain. As the project’s lead designer, Thiel was charged with the question: What should this new kind of technology look like?
It was a hard question to answer, because most computers at the time resembled refrigerators–and because it would be difficult to convince the company’s future clients that yet another giant beige box was truly a new kind of machine. The stakes for the supercomputer’s industrial design were high.
